It’s 2016 And If You Don’t Have a Blog For Your Business You’re Missing Out

We hear about cold calling, cold emailing, direct mail and countless other forms of advertising, marketing, and client acquisition.

Rarely do you see anyone talk about blogging for their business, especially in less sexy niches like plumbing, roofing, etc.

Guys, it’s 2016, and the amount of content that is being produced each and every day is insane. It’s going to be impossible to keep up with, and content will be saturated as time goes on.

Does that mean ignore it? No. It means you need to get on the train and start moving! You have to FIGHT for your piece of the market and get as much real estate as you possibly can when it comes to content.

This is the age of information… or is it the age of distraction? Either way, it’s time to contribute to whatever it is if you want to generate leads for your business or client’s business.

In this post you will learn:

• Why Blogging Helps With SEO
• How To Generate Leads With Your Blog
• Using Your Blog to Assist in the Sales Process
• How To Come Up with Unlimited Content Ideas
• How To Promote Your Blog Content
• And other things I’m not thinking of right now

Why Blogging Is Necessary?

I don’t usually like spitting out statistics, because many of them are flawed or weighted to push an agenda. I think that’s also the case with these statistics I’m about to share because after all, they come from inbound marketing and content marketing companies.

They certainly aren’t going to share statistics that promote outbound marketing techniques, but if they really believed inbound marketing is the one true way to generate leads, they wouldn’t be using the same outbound techniques they put down in their own content. Kind of funny seeing that happen.

Anyway, here’s some statistics… Even if they aren’t 100% accurate, I do believe they show a trend in the direction of digital marketing.

• 76% of B2B Marketers Said They Will Produce More Content in 2016.

And it’s been happening. Content production is at an all time high, for sure. The more content your competitors are publishing, the more catching up you have to do!

• Marketers That Use Blogs, get 67% MORE Leads Than Those That Don’t.

I think 67% is a high number. I can’t imagine that being true across the board but I guess it makes sense. The companies that blog, are more likely to have a complete marketing strategy. Is it the blog that generates 67% more leads? I think it’s the fact they have a more well rounded approach that accounts for the large increase in leads.

• Marketers who prioritize blogging are 13x more likely to achieve a positive ROI on their efforts.

Kind of a silly statistic here. This is like saying business owners that prioritize their business over laying on the couch, are 13X more likely to achieve profitability. LOL.

• Companies who blog receive 97% more links to their website.

I believe this to absolutely be true, and surprised the number is that low.

• Blogs have been rated as the 5th most trusted source for accurate online information.

Probably true. I wonder what the other 4 most trusted sources are? Idiot friend recommendations on facebook?

• 70% of Customers Say That Blogs Influence What They Buy.

Blogs have influenced what I buy, so I can go along with this one.

• 70% of buyers prefer to get to know a company through articles than by ads.

Once again, I’m surprised the number is that low. Do you really want to get to know a company through their ads or through their content? When you think about lead nurturing, that’s what it’s all about, using content to help your leads make a decision that preferably ends with them buying from you.

• 95% of businesses with blogs report higher search rankings.

I can see this being accurate. After all, when you have a blog you’re usually adding content relevant to your niche or location. This definitely helps with location and industry relevance in Local SEO.

• Companies with a blog have 55% more traffic than those that don’t.

It’s not the blog that brings in additional traffic, it’s them promoting the blog that brings in the traffic.

Either way, while I have some problems with some of these statistics, I think the evidence is compelling enough to have a blog. I can nit pick all day long about the accuracy, but if we look at it in the macro sense, it’s obvious that it can be beneficial.

Are you with me?

How To Come Up With an Endless Supply of Content

Alright, so if you’re sold on having a blog now, which I hope you are, you’re going to have a couple questions, concerns and wonder how the heck can you continue to come up with content ideas?

When I blogged for my business, it was tough to think of new ideas. It sounds crazy though, but the more you blog, the more content ideas you will have.

One of the big areas of focus for me, is that a blog should help with your local rankings or even national rankings. I believe you should still do keyword research so you can maximize the impact from search but you also need to blog about different areas in your niche, answering common questions people have EVEN if you have no chance of ranking for those keywords.

This helps you with industry relevance. Regardless of whether a specific blog post will rank, you’re adding relevance to your site, which is extremely beneficial in local search.

This FREE Tool Makes It Easy To Come Up With Ideas…

Enter…

AnswerThePublic 

All you have to do is enter one of your keywords or topics, and you’ll have a huge supply of content ideas.

For example, lets enter SEO.

The visualization I can’t fit into this post, but here’s just a TINY sample of what it will show you. I suggest you enter it in for yourself so you can see first hand how beneficial this free tool is.

There’s a ton of ideas with just the seed keyword “SEO”.

Once I go through content ideas and let’s say I’m out of content, I can easily type in local SEO, local search, etc.

Pretty powerful tool you can use. Now all you have to do is create the content.

How Blogging Will Help With Local SEO

When I shared the statistics with you earlier, I didn’t include the statistic that says that companies that blog, have 434% more pages indexed in Google. I guess Hubspot, who came up with that statistic is trying to insinuate that simply having more pages indexed in Google, helps SEO, but that’s not true.

Having more pages indexed, just means you have more pages on your website than others that don’t blog. That’s not very difficult to understand.

However, blogging can certainly help with SEO, just wanted to blast that stupid statistic before digging in further.

If you’ve been reading my pasts post you hear me mention all the time, it comes down to location relevance and industry relevance.

When you blog about something local relevant or industry relevant, it helps your entire site.

Whether the blog post ranks for anything meaningful or not, it still boosts your relevance.

Matt Diggity wrote a post about a year ago on establishing topic relevance. His experience is mostly on the affiliate SEO side of things, but he’s also had his fair share of local SEO clients.

He had a client, a surgeon in San Francisco and the client wanted to start ranking in Oakland as well. This is what he said he did:

All I did was throw-up 4 (random-ass) articles that talked about Oakland and linked them to his landing page.

• Oakland Nightlife Review
• Best Restaurants in Oakland
• Budget Hotels in Oakland
• Famous People from Oakland

Google knew his site was about his particular form of surgery.  They also knew his site was all about San Francisco because of the Schema, Title tags, About and Contact pages which all discussed San Francisco.

His site just didn’t have enough to do with Oakland, so I gave them what they wanted.  Even though the articles had nothing to do with his service, that didn’t matter.  He needed to establish topic relevance for the city of Oakland and that was all.

Now, I’m not sure I would recommend the random articles, but hey, he got results with it so who am I to judge? Results are what matters, despite what the BS gurus try to push your way.

The articles he added to the site, isn’t exactly the point here. The point is that he added supporting content in order to rank the client in the new city.

That is exactly what the power of a blog can do. It gives you so many options for content, and what you can write, that even if the blog posts aren’t ranking in search, it benefits your website as a whole.

Does that make sense?

If you have a client that does home remodeling, kitchen, bath remodeling, etc. and decided he wants to add a new service, and wants to rank for “Fence Contractor” in whatever city, you can add a page dedicated to the fence part of his business, and if that doesn’t stick, you add supporting content via his blog.

This isn’t rocket surgery or brain science… it’s pretty easy. (Yes, the phrasing was intentional, laugh with me lol)

Plain and simple… a blog, with supporting content will benefit your local SEO and organic SEO efforts. I’ve done it countless times, and most of the time have been able to rank with no additional link building or off page optimization.

How To Promote Your Blog and Generate Leads

Now you know how to generate a massive supply of content ideas and you know how you can use your blog for supporting content, but what about using your content in order to generate leads?

That’s what we always want right? More leads, more sales, more money for world domination.

So how can we use our blogs to generate more leads?

3 Steps To Get The Most Out of Your Blog

Step 1 – Come up with a lead magnet

You should probably do this before you even type up a single blog post. This is how you’re going to generate an opt in list with your autoresponder service like AWeber. (I recommend mailchimp for cold emails as mentioned in my Ice Cold Email Gold guide)

A lead magnet is something you use to bribe people to give you their email address or other information.

If you go to the Hubspot blog, they are masters at creating lead magnets. Every blog post has some sort of lead magnet, some have more than one.

White papers, guides, templates, files, they give it away in exchange for an email address so they can continue marketing to you. Some lead magnets only require an email address, others require your phone number and other information.

Tyson Downs of Titan Web Agency uses a 6 part video course as a lead magnet to attract attorneys interested in his services. You can see his lead magnet, just a basic CTA bar at the bottom of his law firm SEO post. For other niches he targets, he uses different lead magnets.

Digital Current also uses a lead magnet in their posts, but it’s not very creative. They’re probably missing out on leads that simply need to be educated, instead, they just offer an SEO audit. So 2011, but hey, at least they’re blogging and using a lead magnet.

Many of you already have been seduced by one of my lead magnets, the top 64 niches to target, which can be found at the bottom of this post. I use Magic Action Box for this, I think they have a free plan for those of you using wordpress.

Step 2 – Create Your Content

You now know about AnswerThePublic for content ideas, so there’s no excuse here.

You can also look at competing blogs, and get ideas from their content.

For example, if they have a post on “5 ways to reduce your bounce rate”, you can use those ideas and expand on it. Make it 3 ways, and go further in depth, or make it 7 ways, and add onto the ideas.

Coming up with content ideas should never be a problem, and it should never be an excuse for why you’re not blogging or using content to increase the growth of your business.

If you REALLY want to set the trail on fire, you can use a keyword research tool like Long Tail Pro to judge your competition and modify the keywords you want to optimize for. Heck, it may give you even MORE ideas for coming up with some content.

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Step 3: Promote The Content

You guys aren’t dumb. This isn’t the first time you’ve heard about blogging, or using content, right?

I’m not going to tell you the same old non-actionable information that everyone else has already told you.

You know what I’m saying, the outreach strategy where you email different bloggers or owners of a website saying “Hey, I noticed you linked to this, so you should link to my shit too”, or begging other people to share their content on social media. I’m also not going to suggest the broken backlink building strategy where you discover sites that linked to others related to your content, and ask them to replace their link.

That’s all indirect benefit type stuff. I don’t care about that type of stuff, and neither should you.

You care about getting your content in front of people that are potential buyers.

Here’s 4 different recommendations I have for promoting your blog posts

1.) Google+ Communities

Maybe Google+ has been a big disappointment to Google, and they seem to be stripping away different parts of it, little by little.

However, one part that is active, and I hope they never take away, is the Google+ communities.

There’s communities where you can share your content and other business owners will see it.

You have to understand though, many communities are filled with marketers, so to get the biggest bang for your time, you need to find the communities that aren’t saturated with other marketers.

The Google Small Business Community has a lot of business owners in it, and many will post asking for help. This is the perfect place for you to distribute some of your content.

Searching for industry specific communities will also give you an advantage. There’s very few marketers in there. For example, the Landscaping, Design, and Garden Ideas community is great for distributing content since many business owners of landscaping companies will frequent the community.

Search for communities that fit into a niche. If you do that and share your content, the people you want to see it are going to click and it will be much easier to generate leads from your content.

2.) LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn brought me a lot of traffic in my business.

In fact, I created a new LinkedIn so I can start promoting my blog posts here on IncomeBully in some of those groups. It’s a great place to share content and a more professional environment so it makes it easier to generate leads from the content you share there.

The same strategy applies to LinkedIn as it does for Google+ communities. You will want to seek out more industry specific groups, and city/area specific groups.

Doing that will cut down on the content marketing competition, and allow you to generate the maximum amount of leads you can from the platform.

3.) Industry Specific Forums

Okay, this is going to seem a bit spammy and maybe dishonest. If you are questioning whether this is ethical or not, I understand and if you have a problem with it, well, just don’t do it.

For me though, I never cared about any potential ethics problem with this strategy.

I came up with this strategy after my first strategy would continue to get me banned on these forums.

Let’s use ContractorTalk as an example.

It’s a forum for contractors, and there’s a marketing section on there. I used to come in as a niche expert for marketing and SEO. It worked for a while, I was able to contribute to threads, share my content to help other people, and make sales.

Well, eventually I got banned for too much self promotion. Then, after creating another 30 or so accounts, they all were getting banned one by one, just by having a link in my signature.

Many other marketers since then have tried and failed.

Except me, because I came up with this solution.

I would start contributing to the forum as a contractor. I would bring up issues or questions that other people had 2 years prior to me signing up. This made them see me as a legitimate peer and not a marketer. Once a week or so, I would share a blog post of my own, linking to it from the marketing section. I shared my experience of what was working and what wasn’t. I would bash certain marketing methods, and share “interesting information” that was on my blog, but they didn’t know it was my blog.

Is it shady?

Sure…

Is it effective?

Very.

So if you want to use niche specific forums to your advantage, you would be best off by contributing as one of their colleagues, you’re one of them, you’re not a marketer. You just slip in a bit of content here and there and if anyone ever asks you why you keep doing that, well, you’ve been considering using them (yourself) for SEO or whatever service, and wanted to get everyone else’s thoughts on it too.

Simple.

4.) Use Manta Communities 

Manta is a citation/directory source that has been devalued over the years in my opinion. It definitely isn’t as strong or solid as it once was, but it still gets the page views. I guess it is still a top 20 citation source, so it still holds plenty of value with that alone.

I sometimes wonder whether the page views are from consumers or from people like us just scraping data.

Well, they must be getting some serious views since a specific post has 20,000 views and it’s a crappy thing about improving your local SEO rankings.

They have a lot of different forums, the SEO forum they have isn’t very competitive. You could drop in your content in there, and consistently do it so you can generate traffic and leads from others that visit the forum.

Sometimes your post in their community will be featured and emailed to all the members. That can drive some SERIOUS traffic and leads to your blog/website.

Final Thoughts

There’s far more you can do with your blog than what I mentioned in here. I didn’t even get to touch on the process of lead nurturing, but hopefully this has at least convinced you and provided enough confidence for you to get started on your own blog.

There’s absolutely no reason you should have a website without a blog. The longer you put it off, the harder it will be to get moving.

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